


Gravity

by yuffiehighwind



Category: Beetlejuice (TV 1989), Beetlejuice - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-01
Updated: 2008-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-07 10:26:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3171440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuffiehighwind/pseuds/yuffiehighwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia's senior prom approaches, and she finds her relationship with Beetlejuice has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> In May 2008, I wrote a Beetlejuice/Lydia fanfic just to see if I could.

Lydia gazed into the mirror, strands of black hair curled around her fingers. She tried once, twice, three times to pull it up into the impossible updo her hair fixed itself into whenever he was around, but it untangled each time.

His name tried to escape her lips, but everyday she bit her tongue. There was too much here, in the Outerworld, and his presence that once filled her with joy would dash her hopes. Sabotage, even. Ahead lay college, senior year ticking by fast, and while Lydia Deetz wanted a life full of adventure and wonder more than anything, her life with him wouldn't be a life at all. So college came second-best.

She brushed her hair.

He just didn't understand. His 600-year-long undeath had been revitalized by the laugh and friendship of an innocent mortal, but he'd been dead for so long, he still often forgot what it was to live. His icy grip held her back. She would grow up, otherwise, and work, marry, have children, then die as the Maitlands did, tragicomically, her lover by her side, and haunt her descendants, eeking out a peaceful life as ghosts did for centuries. He never wondered if every second she spent in the Neitherworld with him as flesh and blood did something to her soul, or to time, or to slow her body's aging, or hasten it, or how his touch affected her on a human level. She was companion and protege and, never adept at matters of the heart, he had no idea she was in love with him.

 

* * *

 

Lydia stopped saying his name shortly after turning 18, and though he manifested in a thousand objects, in every reflection, she would turn her head and ignore him, sometimes speaking to say, "I told you already that I can't do this anymore," and he would scowl and go, "Whatcha talkin' about, Babes?" but she was already gone, walking away.

If he were mortal, didn't have to fit centuries of memory into one mind, he would remember the day she turned 18, and how he took her into the Neitherworld to stare out at its facsimile of the ocean. How she sighed, tears pooling in her eyes, and clutched him tight to her. Resting her head on his shoulder, she entwined her fingers in his, and he was startled by this affection, frozen. She cried then, silently and without dramatics, just gazing and gazing, finally asking, "Is this it?"

Unsure if Lydia meant their relationship or the ocean, he didn't reply. Thankfully, she clarified.

"Is this what happens? It continues just the same?"

"Pretty much," he whispered.

Silence stretched on, and without looking at her, he felt her let go, sensed her drying her eyes with her hands, and heard her take a deep breath.

"I want to go home," she said. Instead of giving all the usual protestations, the inkling of feeling that something more profound than petulant teenage angst was going on here, he could say nothing before she said his name three times and vanished.

 

* * *

 

Not long after, he stopped appearing in mirrors. Lydia found herself looking into every reflective surface, just out of habit, especially if something funny was said, to see his reaction. Her own face peered back, her body taller and fuller, more mature. The image of a woman.

Girls asked where Betty was. Her parents asked her, her father Charles concerned as if she were drinking or doing drugs, why she was being so... _normal_  all of a sudden. Her step-mother Delia was overjoyed to see Lydia with her classmates, Lydia doing homework, Lydia going to prom. The prom! She and her friends had, at first, planned on boycotting such a ludicrous custom, to have their own anti-prom party, but were roped into attending out of tradition's sake. Lydia still planned on wearing a dress designed as close to her Neitherworld outfit, taking her strange photos to tailors in town, the mysterious older man in unflattering stripes covered over or cut out entirely. Lydia was privately pleased to have found a gown suitable to replace her red digs, which had vanished from her closet several weeks after last leaving the Neitherworld.

Delia was way too overexcited about the prospect of her little girl going to her very first dance, and her energy almost convinced Lydia to abandon the idea, but if Lydia didn't go, her other misfit classmates couldn't go. She was their rock, the prom queen of the nerds, and if she didn't attend, the dance wouldn't be worth attending anyway. This filled Lydia with a sort of pride, but she tried not to show it, displaying her usual misanthropic and off-putting persona. But that these same classmates could see through her eye-rolling was a liability. If they saw her get excited about prom, what other mundane Outerworldly things would she become excited about next? When would she become complacent and settled in this life? Would she be betraying everything she had shared with...him?

 

* * *

 

The dress was ready, but the updo was the hardest. Before, she could wave her hands and it would spider its way into shape. And the older she got, the harder it had become for  _him_  to ignore her beauty. At first, her baby fat remained, her pale cheeks rounded out in a fixed pout, her skinny arms crossed over her flat chest as she rolled her eyes at him, and she looked child enough for him to keep a sort of avuncular countenance around her. That last year, that last day, it took all the strength he had not to touch her here, there, to rub up close and feel that warm, mortal skin of hers. And she  _trusted_  him! She probably didn't realize how much she touched him on a daily basis, especially when he was transformed into Betty, and how it drove him crazy inside.

In fact, he thought, she probably realized this, which was why she had left him! That she deserved a better first, there was no question. That he could bear her being with any other...Well, that was debatable.

Having observed him cooped up in their apartment for days on end, his roommates began to get concerned, occasionally trying to cheer him or to offer their thoughts on the situation. Jaques was a bit light in the loafers, but managed to supply some good advice about women nonetheless. Ultimately, it came down to a simple truth Jaques noticed neither party had wanted to face for years - Lydia was alive; Beetlejuice was not.

 

* * *

 

The acceptance letters rolled in, to Delia and Charles' great delight. Every college Lydia had applied to accepted, offering financial aid enough to get Lydia through freshman year, along with housing. Every school was far enough away from Peaceful Pines to give Lydia the satisfaction of escaping from its draining boredom, and close enough for her parents to drive out to visit. Impressed with her success, the school guidance counselor advised Lydia on her next step, picking a college and applying for loans, and every girl in her graduating class noticeably slipped into a senior slump. This would have been the perfect time to slip off to the Neitherworld to celebrate, and Lydia, hiding her sunny smile in a black sleeve, looked around for any mirrors, only to sadly remember he wouldn't be there.

Had it all been a dream? Was it just a hallucination, brought on by depression and anxiety? The years blurred, from junior high through to the present, all one long struggle through a misunderstanding world. Her fascination with death and the occult...Ever since her mother's death...Could it have altered her mind so profoundly that she invented the Maitlands, and Beetlejuice? But her parents knew they existed! They knew them to be as real as any flesh and blood people. This was an unspoken fact, but one she had assumed for many years her parents used to explain the unusual goings-on that followed Lydia.

If Lydia had befriended the Maitlands, it only made sense she would befriend the ghosts of the next house they moved to. It was like her calling. That Betty, who her parents raised their eyebrows at and tolerated like a stray animal, could actually be a 600-year-old male poltergeist, a sexual deviant, and a criminal, well, Lydia hoped they didn't jump quite to that conclusion. That she trusted him with her life wasn't something they could ever understand. They would panic as they did when the Maitlands summoned him, when he was actively trying to use them for his personal gain. That he could threaten her like that, for her to turn around and befriend him...no, no one could possibly understand.

 

* * *

 

Sitting at lunch with Bertha and Prudence, who had also grown older and less awkward, Lydia played with her food, half-expecting it to turn to maggots. The prom approached, and the three had voted Lydia to the role of date-finder. Even her nerdy friends had begun to date, though not quite so publicly as their nemesis Clare, but while a few kisses here and some petting there had gotten the girls on the road to womanhood, persuading their crushes (who were just as shy) to actually plan out prom was like pulling teeth. They nominated Lydia to prom-planner, despite her lack of a boyfriend, assuming all her mysterious disappearances over the years and aversion to boys was due to an out-of-town romance. The nature of this romance was anyone's guess, and neither Prudence nor Bertha were brave enough to pry. They still responded, though, when a flabbergasted Lydia asked them why  _her_ , "Because you're good at this sort of thing."

Good at this sort of thing? Sure, she had  _some_  idea of how it should go. Boy + Girl + Music = Romance. A prom coordinated between her school and the boys' school across town was Peaceful Pines' closest thing to an ordinary prom, and while public high school proms were as much about flaunting for your peers as they were about sex, this one's rare inclusion of the opposite gender poured on added pressure to make it a Night to Remember. There was no beating around the bush. If Clare hadn't lost a certain valued possession already, she was losing it tonight.

Lydia had no choice but to approach Prudence and Bertha's sort-of-boyfriends after school and scare them into asking the girls properly. She took off some pressure by assuring the boys she would arrange transportation, and the pre- and post- prom parties could happen at her house. The boys were relieved and scurried off to find their respective dates, if only to escape Lydia's steely glare. Leaning against the wall to the boys' school, she glanced around to notice Clare drive up in her parents' convertible to pick up a tall, blonde quarterback type. The gender role reversal was comical, with the girl picking up the boy, but their relationship came across as typical '90s teen, oozing unresolved sexual tension. Clare frenched the boy as three of his peers passed, whistling. Lydia rolled her eyes and hopped on her bike to head home.

 

* * *

 

Neither Lydia nor Beetlejuice could remember broaching the subject of sex. When she was younger, it wasn't appropriate. She was a pretty young thing, but she was just a child. Seeing her eyes widen at the sights and sounds of the Neitherworld was satisfaction enough, and her companionship filled a hole in the ghost's undeath no woman, live or dead, ever could.

But when her mother decided to have The Talk, Part 2 with Lydia, who covered her face in her hands and prayed Beetlejuice wasn't listening, it left Lydia awkward and numb for a week. She pulled off apathy pretty well when her stepmother explained and re-explained the topic, harumphing and rolling her eyes.

"Delia," she said, "I already know where babies come from, and I'm not about to go try and get practical experience any time soon. Frankly, it makes my skin crawl."

Delia looked concerned, insisting it was normal to have such feelings. Lydia assured her she knew this, that she felt attraction as any other teenager did, but that there were no boys (or girls, she assured the New Age, liberal Delia) that she particularly liked yet. This got Delia to drop the subject, but since this coincided with Prudence and Bertha's own experimenting, Lydia felt like she was being sucked into a Sandworm pit. Every boy she bumped into she was suddenly concerned was a raging sex maniac, while the only person in her life who actually fit that description was a guest in her bedroom on a regular basis. She held off summoning him for five days, and when he got clingy and insistent, she let herself be transported to the Neitherworld instead, so that his roommates Jaques and Ginger would be there as chaperones.

"What's the problem, Babes?" he asked, but telling him directly mortified the girl. What was she doing here with a 600-year-old ghost? And not even an attractive one at that. Lydia pulled Ginger aside to have The Talk, Part 3, The Spider Perspective.

"Ginger," she said. "There's something that's been bothering me. You've known Beej for a long time, right?"

"Long enough," the spider replied. "What did you want to know?"

Lydia looked around, uncharacteristically worried and jittery. It didn't take Ginger too much time to figure out there was something very wrong. "You know how I'm...older, now?"

Silence stretched awkwardly for a bit, and the spider scratched her head, turning this way and that. "No, I didn't notice. With humans it's hard to tell when their skin is still attached."

Lydia smiled a little bit, but continued, "No, I mean, I'm older now." She gestured subtly to her chest, but the spider, not endowed with breasts, still didn't catch on. After a while longer of miming, the spider nodded and said, "Oh, you mean you're a woman."

"Yes."

"So?"

Lydia bit her lip. Talking to another species about human mating habits was more difficult than talking to her stepmother about it.

"I mean I'm a  _woman,_  now. You know, maybe Beej has  _noticed_  this. Being a  _man._  Sort of."

Luckily, Jacques chose this moment to walk into the kitchen.

"Ginger, I can take over if you like."

Ginger smiled and crawled away, much relieved to be released from the awkward teenager.

"Lydia, I understand exactly what you mean. I think you need to talk to him about it yourself."

Lydia turned bright red, then pale, almost all at once. She looked pleadingly up at the skeleton.

"Please, Jacques, you gotta help me out. I can't talk to him about this. I just can't! Please talk to him for me, you've got to."

Jacques shook his skull. "He wouldn't understand, coming from me. He doesn't listen to anyone but you."

Lydia shut her eyes tightly, and turned away from the skeleton. She gripped the countertop and felt some cockroaches scuttle by her fingertips. Turning back around, she began, "But Jacques..." but instead, Beetlejuice stood there, eyeing the cockroaches with a menacing glee. He swiped at one, brushing her hand with his as he did so, and stuffed it in his mouth. He burped.

"Free food! Always the best. Hey, Babes, what're you doing out here?"

Lydia stood stock still and tried to smile. He stood so close!

"Just talking to your roommates. They think you should dirty up the place! It's your turn, after all."

And he just smiled, oblivious.

 

* * *

 

"Beej," she started, another time, still only 17 years old. "Do you think I'm..." She couldn't say it. This was wrong on so many levels. But she began to wonder, when he looked at her with that freaky, devilish grin of his. She used to know it meant he had a scheme he wanted to share with her. Now she wasn't so sure of the difference between this expression she'd come to know, and a leer. Was he still her best friend? Or did he expect more? She dressed down and covered up every bit of bare skin, but when he pulled her close, his arm around her shoulder in a friendly tug - showing her some new thing in the Neitherworld - his bare hand, cold as ice, brushed her neck. She shivered, either from the cold or the touch, but it wasn't an unwanted feeling per se. Just...different. Her stomach did flip-flops and she leaned into him, all while her mind screamed against it.

"What is it?" he asked, looking down at her, all his affection in that gaze he reserved for her and no one else in the two worlds.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" Lydia blurted, not moving, not breathing. She felt his fingers on her chin then, gently pulling her face around to look at him. She opened her eyes reluctantly, used to the ugly visage of the poltergeist, and more afraid of what his expression would be than the pale yellow and green of his face.

"Yer beautiful," he said, his voice not quite right, not quite Beetlejuice. She shut her eyes again, leaning her cheek against his palm, just feeling. It startled him just about out of his decaying skin. Her pulse had quickened, her cheeks reddening, her lips a bright, live pink. He let go.

"So, uh, 'bout time you got goin', eh?"

Lydia opened her eyes.

"Yeah," she said, giving him a curious look to his ambiguous one. And so she said the spell and was gone.

They didn't mention it again.

 

* * *

 

Lydia stood outside the boys' school waiting for her new friends. The two were interchangeable to her, but they mattered to Bertha and Prudence, and so they had to matter to her. The girls had secretly asked the boys to find Lydia a date to the prom, and so today they came out with their third man in tow, Lydia surprised (but not showing it) to be introduced to him.

Christopher was his name, and the boys high-fived and congratulated themselves on a job well done. They had found a boy just as handsome but otherworldly as Lydia to set her up with, and she found herself smiling, even slightly flirting, as they walked their bikes home. He was also a blossoming graphic artist, and was attending an arts college in the fall. Lydia envied this fact, since she had all but decided on a local university to attend (starting out undeclared but enrolled in photography courses), and the boy even got her reconsidering enrolling in one of the liberal arts colleges she had got into in order to focus on her craft.

This was the only person in all of Peaceful Pines that Lydia had met who had any iota of interest in art (other than her talentless stepmother), and she wondered if he had been summoned up by some kind of spell by the boys. But they assured her, no, he just moved here several years earlier from New York City. Amazed and attracted, Lydia and the boy never even went about asking each other to prom. They just naturally assumed. Like magnets.

 

* * *

 

Lydia's hair would still not go up, so she pinned it in place, hair-sprayed the hell out of it, and waited for it to harden. Money wasn't tight. Delia had offered to bring her to a hair salon to get a proper updo, but Lydia resisted. Clare and her cronies would be there, and the last thing she needed before the biggest (formal) event of her adolescence was a put-down from that blonde harpy.

Still looking in the mirror, only a few minutes before Christopher and the others would arrive, Lydia became resigned to her fate as an ordinary girl, with an ordinary life (and a pulse). And so she said it, and it came easy, like exhaling.

"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice."

Cutting the theatrics, he appeared silently, and so she assumed it hadn't worked. She lay on her bed, her skirt curled up around her, feeling heavy, like a dead weight. Then she felt him.

He sat on the bed beside her, his hand on her waist, so she took it, wrapping her fingers in his.

"I thought you'd never come back."

He sneered, acting the villain, but his heart wasn't in it. "I thought you'd never call."

"Beej..."

So he lay down with her, pulling her into his arms, smelling of sweat and death, sex and sand and eternity, her hair falling all out across the pillow, untangling itself like snakes into long strands of black silk. He breathed her in though he lacked working lungs, and she smelled of life. She'd never understand what that feeling was, being around the living, like a vibrant sort of humming as their blood and organs pumped and pumped, in constant motion even when they lay still as statues. It was what drew him to her, the virgin mortal who could see ghosts and relate to them as though they were living flesh. It woke up the senses, and made undeath feel as uncertain and frightening as life was, just being near a living human.

But there was a knock at the door. It was Delia, come to tell Lydia her friends had arrived to take pictures. Beetlejuice let go, but Lydia turned and wrapped her legs around him, holding her breath against the smell of undeath and made him look at her. Her eyes were hard, old, much older than an 18 year old mortal girl.

"Do you want me?" she asked, and he had a hundred thousand cheeky replies to that statement, and a hundred horrible things he could have done to her, Delia at the door be damned. Instead, he nodded.

"O' course I do. I always have. What d'ya want me to say? That yer a Grade A piece of meat? Oven fresh?"

Her gaze faltered and she began to pull away. But he wouldn't let go.

"Did you want me to take you? Yer just an innocent girl."

He grabbed the front of her dress.

"Like this?"

Her eyes widened, frightened.

"Of course not." He let go. Pushing her off of him, he got up and headed for the mirror.

"I stayed for your  _mind_ , Lyds. You made undeath worth it. Don't let an old ghost ruin your life."

Lydia wrapped her arms around her legs, curled up, closed off.

"Say it," he said.

She shook her head.

"SAY IT."

"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!"

At that, he was gone, and Delia opened the door.

"Lydia!"

But Lydia could only cry.

Her stepmother ran over to her and took her in her arms. "Shhh, shhh, there there, he's gone. He's gone."

"You knew?" Lydia choked.

"Of course I knew," Delia whispered, scowling. "Now get up, your friends are waiting."

Lydia shook her head again, wiping her eyes. She didn't notice Delia let go and back up, mouth gaping in shock.

"What is it?" the girl asked, gaining her composure.

Delia wiped her step-daughter's wet cheek and turned her to face the mirror.

Her hair had defied gravity.


End file.
